My VCAP5-DCA Exam Experience

Well, I took the VCAP5-DCA exam on Monday 8/19, and it was everything the blueprint said it would be.

This was by far the most challenging certification exam I have taken to date. Like many others before me have said, I think the content was fair and a good representation of the product. The testing center setup does leave a little to be desired because you are working from a jump box on a single monitor, so navigating is a little cumbersome. Others have complained of slowness, but my testing center had a pretty good performing rig and I didn’t feel like it was dragging too much. I started at question 1 and made it all the way to 26. There was one question and a few tasks in multi-part questions that I did not complete because I could not remember the exact method at the moment while under pressure and there were other questions that had plenty of low hanging fruit. I ran the clock out trying to finish those few things, but some did not get done. I used every bit of the 3.5 hours with no breaks. Fortunately, partial credit is possible.

I can’t say enough good things about this training. You can get a Trainsignal subscription to ALL of their content for $49/mo. This class is well worth a one month subscription and they have many other courses of interest that are on my to-do list.

I was not aware of vBrownBag until I started to prepare for this exam, but it is something I will follow going forward. There is a whole series available for free covering the VCAP5-DCA topics and they are packed with great information. Do yourself a favor and check them out.

This well put together checklist covers the whole blueprint and is what kept me organized when going through all of the topics.

My own lab

This is probably the most important study tool. Go through the whole blueprint and make sure you do everything in lab. I work with VMware every day at work, but there are plenty of things that I have just simply never had a need to do or don’t do often and these are what can get you in the exam.

Overall, I think I did pretty well on the exam, but I don’t feel nearly as confident as I’d like. It will be a long 15 days waiting for the results, fortunately, I’ll have VMworld and a vacation with my family to keep me occupied. I’ll update here when I get the results.

Time to start studying for the VCAP5-DCD!

UPDATE:On the 29th I got an email from VMware showing that I passed the exam. Woohoo!